In the entire history of cinema, there have been only two truly important, indispensible, founding films - this is one of them.

'Sans Soleil' opens with a ferry trip to Japan, with the camera peering at
sleeping passengers. This is a perfect encapsulation of the film as a
whole, a beautiful mixture of journey and dream. The film is ostensibly a
documentary, that holier-than-thou genre convinced of its own superior
truthfulness. And the film is full of documentary images, snapshots from
the faraway places Marker visits, Japan, Africa, South America, San
Francisco, Iceland, Paris. The film is full of the observations of the
filmmaker about the cultures he observes.

But 'Sans Soleil' couldn't soar further from the prosaic ambitions of the
documentary. Like the film it most resembles, Marker's own 'La Jetee', it
is in fact a work of science fiction, as much about time travel as literal
travel. Each place Marker visits is stripped of its familiarity, and made
eerie, alien. Concrete images become springboards for dizzy philosophical
speculations. The film moves with ease from the court of 11th century
Imperial Japan to the revolutionary struggles in 1960s Africa to emus on the
Ile de France to an interpretation of Hitchcock's 'Vertigo' to astrological
rumination on a desert beach, and still remains thematically coherent and
full of the most startling connections.

It is this structure that creates the feel of science fiction, the linking
of seemingly disparate images, symbols, stories, experiences, places to
create a strange pattern which emanates something spiritual, that seems to
make sense of increasing chaos, dislocation, displacement. But we are
constantly reminded that these are secular, man-made, ad-hoc, arbitrary
constructions, as phantom as the relationship in 'La Jetee', but, similarly,
a necessary construction to cover the abyss.

The distortion of the soundtrack, the mixture of silence and mooged
classics; the computer visuals of Marker's friend, known as The Zone, which
seep conventional, representational images and turn them into ghosts,
traces, stripped of history, recognisability, humanity; the film's fictional
framework (the narrative comprises letters to the narrator by the filmmaker,
Sandor Krasna) all add to this unsettling science fiction appropriation of
the documentary genre.

When the history of cinema comes to be written in centuries to come, there
will really only be two films that will survive from its first century,
films dense, supple, playful, renewable enough, and full of enough
possibilities for future direction, to transcend the local, the generic, the
pretentious, the narrative. One is that final gasp of modernist cinema,
'Vertigo'; the other is this epitome of post-modernity. in many ways, 'Sans
Soleil' is a stunning exegisis on Hitchcock's masterpiece (which had only
just been re-released after two-decades withdrawel), echoing its circular
structure, its concern with time, memory, the elusiveness of history.

'Soleil' locates the crisis of post-modernity in Japan, that most modern of
modern capitalist societies. With the curiosity of an anthropologist, the
good humour of an essayist, and the eye for the unusual of a rare filmmaker,
Marker gives us a Japan we rarely see, even in the country's own cinema; on
the one hand a culture of startling modernity, leading the way in computers,
technology, department stores etc., on the other full of residual
traditions, rituals, superstitions, ceremonies, going back centuries. The
co-existence of these two time-scales has resulted in a kind of blur, a
temporal vacuum, whereby all sense of time and perspective is lost, where
religious ceremonies for the souls of stray pets co-exist with
state-of-the-art video games.

Japan is like a ship that has lost its anchor, where all time is the same,
and therefore irrelevant, just as Scottie Ferguson wanders around dazed, in
a loop of fantasy and distorted memory. Without history, memory, a culture
ceases to be a culture and lays itself open to all sorts of vulnerability.
But this lack of foundation ironically leads to a greater freedom,
particularly of the mind, and the film, as it reaches its conclusion,
becomes visionary and hallucinatory.

'Soleil' is anything but bleak - its stories, myths, cultural tidbits,
observations are unfailingly entertaining and full of good humour. Krasna
compares the overcultured, saturated Japan to the timeless emptiness of
Africa, to the spooky otherworldliness of Iceland, as his 'objective'
narrative becomes increasingly a personal odyssey that must be teased out
from hints and ellipses. In its focusing on the minutae, the forgotten, the
arcane, the ephemeral, the back alleys, the garbage, but suggesting that
'Soleil' is ultimately only one film out of a possible multitude made
possible by new technologies, Marker's film is at once profoundly democratic
yet exhilaratingly idiosyncratic; an apocalyptic vision teeming with
life.

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38 out of 49 people found the following review useful:

An amazement

I've only seen this film twice, both on the same day, nearly fifteen years
ago; and yet its poetic-philosophical themes, its melancholy, its images
still remain with me. Viewing it was an intensely personal experience; I
find myself a little startled to find that other people have seen it. I
find myself plagiarising it constantly; I think of it at odd times (when I
accidentally catch someone's eyes and immediately look away; whenever I
visit San Francisco); it is a work of lingering and subtle beauty that
percolates through my bloodstream, informing the hours and days, changing
the things and ways I see...

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34 out of 51 people found the following review useful:

This is not a documentary

To call this film a documentary is to cheapen it. It's life on screen, not
a mere document. It's poetry... and I'm not sure that word is adequate.
How about your view of how you live and the world around you? Have you ever
seen a film that gave you the questions to ask yourself? This film is
startling... I can't praise it enough. My mind was exhausted by considering
the layered imagery, both audio and visual, and the contextual shifts
between them. How does anyone pick up a camera after seeing this? You
might as well toss it in the trash because Marker has made Earth's last
film.

It's a crime that this film is not available on VHS or DVD in the U.S. Fans
of this film should also seek out "The Koumiko Mystery", another
transcendant film by Chris Marker.

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16 out of 22 people found the following review useful:

A film that can make earth seem like a strange and foreign planet

A poetic and rambling essay film, in the form of a letter from a lost
and lonely traveller. Chris Marker lets his mind and camera roam
through the landscape of early eighties Japan, and his imagination
drift across the world. Memory history and emotion blend into a loving
study of human existence. The film's form is loose and sprawling and it
it almost impossible to try to follow it in any linear fashion. Instead
it washes across the surface of you conscious mind, occasionally
burrowing deep with images you can never forget. It is a completely
unique film and is inspiring in its ability to bring the political, the
philosophical and the poetic together on screen. Chris Marker is one of
the unsung greats of film history.

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14 out of 20 people found the following review useful:

re: pretentious claptrap

A response to the reviewer who called the film pretentious claptrap:
This movie is not for everyone and I can easily understand the
sentiments of one who finds it pretentious. But when one says
"Assumptions include that the east is superior to the west, television
is bad, capitalism evil,etc." you are so thoroughly missing the point
of the film that I have to wonder if you watched it out of the corner
of your eye while doing a crossword puzzle. Perhaps one doesn't hear
"Capitalism is good" and understands "capitalism is evil," but that all
occurs within the viewer. I for one never saw any of these
"assumptions" being made here.

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14 out of 21 people found the following review useful:

Documentaries record the real; this is beyond 'real'.

When is a documentary not a documentary? SANS SOLEIL is a film comprising
'real' images, narrated with 'real' observations. The subject-matter is
Japan, post-modernism, the erasion of memory, the flattening-out of history,
decentring, surface, pastiche. It records life-styles, trends, habits,
rites, artistic movements with the rigour of an anthropologist. It is a
film about travel: throughout the world, throughout time. It is science
fiction (Terry Gilliam's TWELVE MONKEYS fleshes out an anecdote here). It
is a Borgesian fantasy, (the filmmaker is actually a fictional creation ,
Sandor Krasna). To call it a documentary, or even a film, would be like
calling the Sistine Chapel a ceiling.

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10 out of 15 people found the following review useful:

A film about memory that you won't forget

With "Sans Soleil," Chris Marker skillfully blends image, sound,
and voice in a powerful way that I've never experienced before
or since. No mere description can begin to convey this film's
stunning effect on my intellect and my senses. Not quite a
documentary, not quite fiction, Marker's film emerges as a
mesmerizing meditation on the meaning of time, space, and
memory. "How," he asks, "does one remember thirst?" A film you
won't forget.

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8 out of 12 people found the following review useful:

The Two Poles of Survival = Tokyo / Africa

Visionary filmmaker Chris Marker creates a portrait of ever encroaching
globalization in this 100 minute odyssey between the 'two poles of
survival'.

Probably one of the greatest 'avant-garde' films of all time, don't let
its classification dissuade you. This is a very simple film with a very
simple message: though time changes, what nourishes humanity remains
constant, namely love, memory, hope, understanding, recognition and
belonging.

The only frustrating thing about this film is that one viewing is not
enough. This is a work you will cherish re-watching for years to come.

Direct cinema science-fiction set on Planet Earth.

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5 out of 7 people found the following review useful:

Sunless: the memory of itself.

I had to struggle over whether or not I could do this movie justice by
writing a review of it after only seeing it once; it's definitely one
of those films that, though you can understand it as it goes along, and
it is not in any way what one would call difficult, is one that has so
many different details and points that it seems relatively rude to try
to shorten it down to a synopsis. Then again, as it's work in memory,
impression, and time precludes, who's to say that the instant of
reviewing it does it injustice merely by struggling with it's
impression of it? Well okay, now I'm just being pretentious.

"Sans Soleil" can be generalized as an almost two-hour visual essay on
memory, poetry, and imagery, based around Chris Marker's travels around
the world, focusing mostly on Japan and Africa. It lacks the visceral
and unsettling effects of his short "La Jetee", but it isn't like it's
meant to be... though both films can be considered "contemplative",
this one is much more meditative and philosophical, continually
reworking it's ideas even to various points of self-awareness made
ironic through the narrator's "He wrote... He said..." misdirection.

For some reason, it may be impossible to describe just how such a film
can be considered so striking and yet still sound so simple (read any
review that likes it, they will be awed but there'll be doubt in the
minds of any that have seen it that it couldn't possibly be all that).
What's interesting about it is that it is, in fact, a very simple work,
especially structurally. It is even in a way dated since it uses
computer effects of the time that, though they still are used
experimentally today, still feel older in a
this-was-new-back-then-but-we're-past-it-now way. But still... somehow
it works, gets under the skin, says things in ways that you think you
understand and then snap too and realize that you've been so lost in
what's been going on that you've not paid attention--or was it too much
attention? It is, indeed, like it's own memory of itself.

--PolarisDiB

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31 out of 60 people found the following review useful:

Eastern cultures through a Western lens. Also, boring.

I'm surprised to see that so many other reviewers tolerated and even
loved SANS SOLEIL. In my opinion, SANS SOLEIL is an inferior version of
KAYAANISQATSI (which was released the same year): while KAYAANISQATSI
lets its images of different societies, machines, and crowds speak for
themselves, Chris Marker layers a monologue of pseudo-intellectual
babble over his. The footage itself is pretty interesting: we see
Japanese people performing ancient purification rites, some nice shots
of Iceland's lunar landscape, and other scenes from societies around
the world, but the voice-over pretty much ruins it. It's like a failed
poet hijacked National Geographic and forced them to make SANS SOLEIL
instead of something interesting. Honestly, you could probably find
more meaningful prose in a teenage goth's LiveJournal.

I had a few ideological problems with the movie as well. Chris Marker
(a Frenchman, I assume?) darted about in non-Western societies, viewing
foreign people through a camera lens. He then mashed all the footage
together, drawing inferences from the images which he then communicated
to us, the (primarily Western) viewers through a voice-over. He never
interviews anyone he films. His voice is the only one we hear, he is
the sole authority who controls the information we receive, and as a
result he can construct other cultures to fit a message of his
choosing.

What to the people living in the jungle have to say about life? That's
what I'd like to know. But instead we hear through Marker that they are
noble savages, free in their own way despite being so primitive,
practicing mystical rituals the narrator doesn't actually comprehend,
etc. Even Japanese TV somehow serves to illuminate Japanese culture for
Marker, despite the fact that he admits he doesn't speak Japanese and
can't understand a word of what's going on! Edmund Said explores this
form of representation in his book "Orientalism," but basically I see
Chris Marker as the Rudyard Kipling or Marco Polo of our day. He
travels abroad, reports back to us with a romanticized description of
other cultures (which the cultures themselves do not contribute to
directly), we accept it, and the discourse ends. We never learn
anything tangible, besides the fact that Marker found this experience
to be personally significant in some vague way.

Also, I had to close my ears while the narrator discusses Hitchcock's
VERTIGO... I haven't seen that one yet and had a feeling Marker
wouldn't include any spoiler warnings.